Outside Chicago, there is a small cemetery in the woods behind Mundelein Seminary, where I was a student. One night I was exploring it. I looked up and was shocked to see an imposing seventeen-foot angel towering over me and preparing to blow a trumpet. Adrenaline rushed through me. I gasped and uttered, “Oh my God!” Quickly I realized it was in fact a massive bronze statue. I tried to calm myself down. But it still freaked me out.

A few months before they married, my twenty-three-year-old sister and her fiancé planned a cross-country road trip to visit his family. My parents told them that they could only go if they slept in separate hotel rooms, offering to foot the bill. It might sound prudish, but my parents wanted the young couple to understand that their approaching unity was close, but not yet. Patience solidifies love.

A middle-aged woman sat on the couch in my parish office and recounted to me a shocking list of terrible calamities in her life: addictions, terminal illnesses, financial loss, broken relationships, and so on. She smiled as she did so. “Please forgive me,” I asked, “but you seem to be smiling as you share this.” She said, “Father John, I am totally overwhelmed. But I’m smiling because I just can’t wait to see what good things God does with this mess.” She expected God would manifest His glory when she most needed it.

Our national pastime isn’t baseball. It’s what the Bible calls “condemning the world.” We generally enjoy pronouncing curses upon those whom we see as trouble, wrong, or evil. Don’t believe me? Listen to almost any podcast, cable news network, or social media platform to hear it. It will be some version of: “We all agree that if they are eradicated, things will be great.” Condemning is almost always clothed in virtue. It basks in its good intentions. That’s why it is so attractive. Condemning seems like our best path to saving what is good.

I am the Lord your God … You shall not have other gods beside me. —Ex 20:2-3

One of the greatest golfers of all time — if not the greatest — was Jack Nicklaus. Which is why it is baffling that at the beginning of each season he would return to his childhood coach and re-learn how to grip the golf club. It’s like Shakespeare re-learning the alphabet and grammar. Why would he do that? Because Jack knew that the fundamentals are always relevant. Perfecting and obsessing over his grip allowed him to do everything else in the game well. In sports and life, the best ones love the basics.

As a college student, my prized possession was an after-market car stereo. It was my pride and joy: glorious audio, eye-catching display screen, and multi-disc CD changer. It drained my hard earned dollars, but it was totally worth it. It drenched me in music everywhere I drove. On Ash Wednesday of my senior year of college, Father Tom, the Jesuit priest at my university said, “Pray for God to tell you what he wants you to sacrifice for Lent.” I did. In my heart, the answer came: “Give up listening to your car stereo for forty days.” I winced. Not possible, I thought. Can’t do it. I made other plans. The next morning, I was stunned to find that my car had been broken into, and my fancy stereo ripped out and stolen.

When I feel down, I sometimes watch the famous “Double Rainbow” video on YouTube to feel better. It’s hilarious. A young man camping in Yosemite Park sees two rainbows stretching across the sky. He bursts into a kind of ecstasy. “Double rainbow, all the way! Oh my God!” he announces. Then he starts to weep. He cries out, “What does it mean?” Beneath the humor of his glorious overreaction is the deep intuition we all have, I think, when we see the colorful bow in the sky. This Sunday, God sends a rainbow to Noah, and to us. What does it mean?

Recently I had a skin rash, and it was awful. (Please don’t tell anyone.) I am embarrassed to admit that I didn’t handle it well. Complaining, whining, begging for sympathy, and crying were my responses to the merciless itching and burning. In the aftermath, a silver lining emerged. I feel a new heartfelt sympathy for all those vexed with chronic skin problems. If you’ve ever had a seemingly unending skin problem, you know how that sympathy flows up from deep inside.

Maybe I’m weird, but I like spending time in doctor’s offices, confession lines in churches, auto repair shops, prison cells, and support groups of various kinds. It’s refreshing to be with people who humbly admit something is wrong and forthrightly set out on a path toward a solution. When we ignore what is off kilter, we become alone and fragile. In places where people are honest and hopeful about brokenness, sturdy if subtle fellowship usually ensues.

I love movies about exorcisms. Apparently, so do many others. The 2023 movie “Nefarious” features a possibly possessed inmate on death row. Critics were not impressed, but audiences scored it at 97% on the website Rotten Tomatoes. Most people have an appreciation for the demonic realm, even if cultural elites are generally embarrassed about it. As is standard in exorcism movies, the afflicted person (in this case, a man named Edward Brady) thinks and acts like multiple persons. He is someone besides himself. We know what that is like. We feel fake sometimes, not ourselves.

We start telling lies around the age of three, the experts tell us. It’s understandable. Lying is a god-like power. Whatever I want, I need only say it, and the world rearranges itself accordingly. It’s amazing at first. But soon reality snaps back and I’m faced with a dilemma. If I remain committed to my lie I start to fracture into pieces. My words and reality drift apart, and I find myself lost in a lonely world of further falsehoods and fear of being found out.

As a priest, I’m amazed how happily married couples remember the tiniest details of their earliest encounters. They effortlessly report things like: “he wore a blue shirt,” “we ordered brussels sprouts,” “her hair was up in a bun,” and “he spilled shrimp cocktail sauce at my family’s open front door when it was ten degrees below zero,” (that one’s courtesy of my mom). We delight in remembering and speaking of when our new life of love began. The little details are glorious reminders that it’s all real.

A stranger in a foreign land, I was exhausted and homesick as my summer Spanish immersion ended in Guatemala. The rusty minivan arriving outside my small residence filled me with joyful hope. I was flying home to the U.S. and would be, at long last, completely happy. Or so I thought. After about half an hour of being home, I thought to myself, “This place is boring. I want to go somewhere.” So, I hopped in my car and left to see my friends. As I drove, I wistfully wondered, “Where am I truly at home?”